Adobe Marketing Summit 2014 and an Evening with Vampire Weekend

I was in Salt Lake City last week for the Adobe Summit, their annual Marketing Cloud gathering. I’ve attended over a dozen Max Conferences, which cover the Creative Cloud portion of the business, but this was my first experience at the other side of the equation. I’m looking at working in Adobe Experience Manager over the next twelve months so I was looking forward to digging into some of the new features of their platforms. I wasn’t disappointed.

The theme of the conference this year was “Reinventing Marketing” and both of the General Sessions (Tuesday and Wednesday) were great platforms to demonstrate not only what reinvention looks like, but how Adobe’s suite of tools are leading the way. With a host of new features focused on customers and their various interactions all along the funnel, it’s clear that the future of CRM/Media/Social/Analytics/Marketing/Content is all becoming one “cloudy” ecosystem of interlocking tools that are allowing marketers to gain insight in ways not previously seen.

With the ability to do advanced real-time audience profiling, predictive marketing mix planning, and technology that seamlessly manages content across the Web and mobile apps, the Adobe Marketing Cloud is growing into a compelling suite of tools. Most of the sessions I sat in on were focused on Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) and it’s clear that this is the centerpiece of the collection. The latest release of AEM has a nice list of new features that will go a long way towards realizing the “reinvention of marketing”. Language Translation, Content Insight, App Authoring, Digital Asset Management, Unified Moderation, and (for me) the most interesting of the bunch, a tag language that can create HTML assets at runtime from Data pulled from the server. Really interesting stuff. As someone who was new to the platform, I was quite blown away.

Of course, it wouldn’t be an Adobe event without the “Adobe Bash” and this year didn’t disappoint. I’ll leave you with a couple of things. First, Adobe is obviously making all the right moves. They’re centralizing a realtime engine for digital marketing and it’s pretty epic. Secondly, there’s no greater band on earth than Vampire Weekend.